Republicans to target ethnic vote

At a Tea Party convention at Myrtle Beach in South Carolina in January, cheery denunciations of
Barack Obama
’s big budget deficits turned darker when Colin Heaton took the podium to attack “sanctuary cities".

“If you are going to hide them, feed them. Tax your own people into submission. Forty-two per cent of California’s wealthy population have left the state," the author and former marine told the crowd of older, white Tea Party members.

“It’s not because they don’t like California. It’s because they are tired of paying for the idiots that come across the border to get sanctuary."

“They" were Mexican immigrants. Heaton had written a book cataloguing their alleged cost to Americans in money and crime.

Republican figures, including former Republican house speaker Newt Gingrich, South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, senator Jim DeMint and several US House of Representatives members, attended the convention.

When The Australian Financial Review asked one older, retired couple, originally from Connecticut, if this kind of inflammatory rhetoric might not distract from the Tea Party’s goals of budget discipline and small government, they seemed surprised. “You think it’s extreme, do you?" the woman asked.

Gingrich won a resounding victory in the South Carolina primary.
Mitt Romney
went on to win the nomination by outflanking Gingrich and other candidates – including Texas governor Rick Perry who had dealt with immigrants in his state – to the right on immigration policy.

On Tuesday that strategy bit Romney back. Despite scoring 59 per cent of the largest segment of the electorate – the 72 per cent who are whites – he lost the election to Barack Obama.

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Romney got just 27 per cent of the rapidly growing Hispanic vote, which topped 10 per cent of the electorate for the first time, 26 per cent of the 3 per cent who are Asian Americans and only 6 per cent of the 13 per cent who are African American.

Obama dominated those minorities, and also won young voters overwhelmingly, and women voters.

For Marco Rubio, a future leader of the Republican Party and the son of Cuban immigrant parents, it was dismaying to watch his chosen party and its presidential nominee commit political suicide over immigration.

“The conservative movement should have particular appeal to people in minority and immigrant communities who are trying to make it," he said in a statement issued early on the morning after the election.

“Republicans need to work harder than ever to communicate our beliefs to them," Rubio said.

“I am committed to working on upward mobility policies that will ensure people who work hard and play by the rules can rise above the circumstances of their birth and leave their children better off."

Rubio, with former Florida governor
Jeb Bush
, is a potential presidential candidate in 2016. Both men have been saying for some time that the Republicans must recast their immigration platform. And it’s not just immigration policy alone. Hispanics especially appreciate Obama’s health-care laws, and subsidised college loans and grants.

Rubio and Bush are expected to emerge as the leaders of a push to remake the Republican immigration platform. They will need to move quickly. Obama plans to tackle immigration reform in his second term.

Romney didn’t do much worse than previous Republican candidates with minorities, with the exception of bilingual George W. Bush who garnered 44 per cent of Hispanics in 2004. It’s just that minorities mattered less in the past. In 1988, George H.W. Bush won an easy victory with just 30 per cent of Hispanics and 11 per cent of African Americans, because he scored with three-fifths of whites, who were then 85 per cent of the total.

The white share of the total has been dropping at a rate of just over 2 percentage points every four-year election cycle since.

Minorities have been growing, from 15 per cent in 1988 to 28 per cent on Tuesday. In all, Romney won fewer than a fifth, Obama more than four-fifths.

“In the future I think that there’s no question that Hispanic voters will continue to grow and that will be an increasing challenge for the Republicans," said Jack Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College near Los Angeles.